BIG Changes in Moab Camping... and Finding the BEST Free RV Spot EVER!

Last week we arrived in Utah to our first boondocking spot in the new Class C. This area was called BLM 144 and it's quiet, beautiful, and less than 30 minutes from Arches National Park, which of course we had to visit. We only ended up spending one day there before the 95 degree heat sent us looking for a place to plug in. Luckily, 15 minutes away, Utah Raptor State Park had just opened the weekend before. And at $50 a night for water and electric, we had to check it out. It was a great two-day reprieve from the heat, but soon we were itching to get back on the road and find that next great free dry camping spot with a little bit cooler weather. And this next spot doesn't disappoint. Well, this is Utah Raptor State Park. And we didn't really know what to expect since we've been into this area multiple times before it was an actual state park. You know, they started this process in 2022. It doesn't even feel like the same spot. So our very first time here, I want to say, was in 2020. First of all, driving in, you had to go through the mud, like rutted out roads. It felt more like the wild, wild west. And you had that adrenaline with it, and you had the reward of securing that spot. This is totally different. Not better, not worse, just a completely different experience where it's organized, it's paved, it's assigned sites. It's nice they still offer the primitive camping for $15, and then they have the modern camping that has electricity for $50. And water. So it's nice that there's the options there. The number one thing that I love about this location, whether it's the old version or the new version, is the view. I think that the view is what validates it to now be a state park. It is right on the border of Arches National Park. So the state park and the national park butt up to each other. You can see why it's so attractive and why it's so coveted. And I just hope that this transformation doesn't push people away, and I hope that it makes the space last longer so that it's not abused and that this beautiful landscape is preserved longer for people to camp. Long-winded answer? I don't know. What do you think, Aaron? At $50 a night, I'm not that excited about it. Yeah. At $35 a night, this would be like a killer state park with water and electric. It's dead here right now. I'm not sure when this officially opened up, but we just drove through Moab and most of the campgrounds there were pretty well packed. Yeah, roughly 80, 85 bucks a night, probably more for some. You know, it's all about what type of a camping experience do you want? Something that's super close to town, like two miles where you can bike there, easily drive there? Or do you want something more in nature? This is very, very beautiful. I'm just right now soaking in the out of every window because it is breathtaking here, and it's a great place to walk too. There's good walking here in the morning. So we left Moab this morning because it's supposed to be 96 degrees today, and we saw towards Capitol Reef it was supposed to be 10 to 15 degrees cooler. We're 30 miles away and it's still 98 degrees. I don't know what weather channel you're looking at because I did not see that. I saw very similar temperatures, maybe eight degrees cooler is what I saw, not 15. We've been to Capitol Reef one other time, and I remember it being way different than Moab. Obviously it had all this green luscious trees and grass, and it just feels like a much cooler place. But here we are, 30 minutes away, and it's still saying that it's 90 plus degrees outside. And I don't know if we're just going to hit this magical pocket of cooler air or what's going to happen. You are in la-la land, Aaron. La-la land. This is one of the most beautiful drives coming down here, and it just keeps on changing. That was Cathedral Valley back there. We've never been to there either. I will say that this drive right now, we're on Highway 24. Just this drive alone is worth it. If you're considering going to Capitol Reef, maybe you don't have enough time to stay there, I highly suggest just take this route if you can because it is probably my favorite drive in the entire country. And I've been to a lot of places, and I mean it. I mean, I might say that about a different place in three weeks. There's no promises, but it is absolutely jaw-dropping. The colors, the ribbons in the rock, the layers of the sediments, there's hoodoos, there's orange rock, red rock, maroon, blue, sherberts, all the swirls. This is magnificent. And this is one of the reasons I love to drive is because constantly scanning, constantly scanning. You get to take it all in. You don't get distracted. You know, the passenger can get distracted by working or scrolling or sleeping or whatever it is that they feel like doing, but as a driver, you don't miss a beat. And this is, this is top, top, number one. I'm going to say it's number one. Well, since we still have 27 miles of this beautiful drive, we're going to keep going, and hopefully when we get there, it's a little bit nicer, weather-wise that is. Lots of Indy campers. Lots, yeah, there were like three parked in a row. Well, this is Capitol Reef parking lot. We're at the visitor center. This is where we parked travel trailer last time we were here. You know, it's a lot busier now. It's different weather, it's hot, and it feels like Moab here. It feels like Moab. But the red rock is still just as striking. It's an interesting park the way that the highway just all of a sudden starts driving through the park. Like you're literally driving through the park on highway 24, turns into the national park boundaries, and then you can pull off and see some of the sites along the way, and then pull into the national park visitor center, which is where we are right now. So it's 3.30 in the afternoon. It's not an ideal time for anything right now. It's 95 degrees outside. We have to leave the dogs basically in the RV with the generator running if we're even going to go anywhere, which it's extremely hot out. So we might go check out the boondocking spot first, see what that looks like, and then tomorrow we'd come back to the park. But that's just kind of how things are rolling nowadays in the new Class C. We are just being a little bit more free-flowing with what we do because it's not that hard to RV. I had no idea what you were gonna say there. I think the heat is frying my brain a little bit. Well, I think that I'm a little brain fried from the heat too. Okay, let's go check out these cool boondocking spots that are 10 minutes from here right next to the town of Torrey. And there's like five campgrounds in Torrey, so maybe we want to go plug in for the night and whatever instead of running the generator all night. I don't know. Yeah, we did fill up on diesel again just to feel that insurance in case we do need to run the generator all night long. We can. We have that. We're all filled up. So as soon as we left the national park and we drove just a couple miles, the temperature started dropping, the views got beautiful, and all of a sudden we find the most beautiful boondocking, one of the most beautiful we've seen. I'm so excited to be here. First of all, Capitol Reef is an underdog of the Mighty Five, and I'm all about the underdogs. It is beautiful. It's a brand new experience for us. We've never camped at this BLM spot before, and that's always so exciting, and I'm so happy to be here. We didn't know what to expect, and then we drive in, Aaron runs up this hill, and I see him waving me up, and it's like we did it, like victory at 4.10 PM. And those of you wondering about ground clearance, we did find in this spot at the long wheelbase is what got us. So I don't know if I caught it on film yet, but as Chris was driving up the hill, it wasn't even that steep, but it was kind of gradual, and with the long wheelbase, the generator exhaust barely scraped the ground. So it didn't cause any damage, but Chris heard it. I heard it. I got out and looked. Yeah, scary. So we're going to try to level here. Hopefully we can auto level and then get the windows open because it's 10 degrees cooler, but it's still like 88 degrees. It's really warm. So we're going to try the auto level, get some windows open while we're waiting. Oh, that feels good. We'll have a beautiful view out this window too because we're so tall. You know, don't you love it when it all comes together? The temperature drops, we got even a few bars on our cell signal that we didn't have down in the park, and it's just meant to be. I starting to make some beautiful patterns, like the way the sun is starting to set. This is really magical where the rocks start to take different colors and the sun is moving. It's the best time to come in and park. Hopefully the rain will hold out. There are some storms in the vicinity, might hit us, might not. I see some wind dusters whipping around out there, so I'm just going to enjoy watching the weather tonight and taking in all of the elements. Now, if we did have the fifth wheel view up here, that would be phenomenal. We do have a pretty decent view out our driver's side here. Not too bad. It would have been a little bit better if we would have flipped the driver's side to be over there because that's where all of our windows are. But then we won't have the private patio space right there. So you have to pick and choose. Like, do you want our patio to open up to this magnificent view? Which, yeah, that's nice. Or do you want the windows? And they're both great. Like either way, it's a win-win. And this spot is actually fairly unlevel. So this was kind of the only way we could level with our length. So you can't be too far nose down or up or anything like that. So yeah. Good, good spot. Yeah. I'm super stoked. I'm super excited. Happy to be here. I'm like just sitting here with the door open. That's a great shot right there. This site is amazing. To say the least. I mean, it is truly one of the best we've been to in all of our seven years of full-time RVing. Just look at this site and the mountains and the red rock, the color. It's absolutely amazing. Look at the size of that rock. It's like Sedona, Zion, and Hurricane Bluffs all rolled up into one. It's pretty amazing. Of course, it's starting to rain on me right now. It's been gray and cloudy all day long. We've only been here for two days, actually. So yesterday, sunny and beautiful. Today, cloudy, drizzly. So what I'm going to talk about now is our power situation. Hi, Jude. Hey, girl. And I'm going to step inside to do it. It is starting to sprinkle a little bit too much for me to stand out there. And I'm staring at the Victron battery monitor. 36 percent. 36 percent of our 600 amp hour lithium battery bank. And after two days, you know, we're still adjusting to the system. This is a good size system, but we have to give credit to our previous electrical system that Battle Born Batteries and Rich Solar did with us. It was such a large system for a small fifth wheel. And we could sit there for 10 to 14 days and really not run out of power. And this current system is no slouch either. So I'm trying to figure out, are we just using too much power? You know, is it just an adjustment period? So there's a thousand watts of solar up on this roof, which is a decent amount. We've had some previous rigs that had 300 watts of solar or 1200 watts of solar. So we've, you know, been in that size range before. So even yesterday when it was really sunny, we did peak around 750 to 800 watts. So even with that amount of solar coming in, I was just kind of surprised that after day two of sitting here, not moving, you know, we're at 36 percent and we're not charging today with this cloud cover. It's only 345 right now. By tomorrow morning, we would probably be in the 20 percent-ish range roughly and, you know, would probably have to run the generator to charge the batteries back up. So we're just used to having, you know, almost 3,000 watts of solar. So on a cloudy day like this, we might get 500 to 1,000 watts on a big system like that. And on a sunny day like yesterday, boom, we would have recharged all the way back up because we're bringing in, you know, over, well over 2,000 watts of solar. Now if every day was sunny, we wouldn't have a problem. But I wanted to highlight how important it is to have the right size system for your style of camping. And as you can see here on this cloudy day, at 10 30 a.m., we're only getting about 125 watts of solar and our batteries are draining at the rate of just over nine amps per hour. At noon, we're doing a little bit better, over 200 watts of solar now, but that's still not our breakeven point and we are still losing two and a half amps per hour. And then finally, a few hours later, we are breaking 300 watts now and we're over our average consumption rate, which is giving us a charging rate of just over five amps per hour. So just for the fun of it, if we had twice as much solar in these examples, we'd be around 250 watts, 400 watts and 600 watts of solar, which would have put us at the breakeven point by the first reading at 10 30 in the morning, starting to charge our batteries shortly thereafter and giving us a much longer runtime to let the sun do its thing. So I think what I'm going to do right now, just to test it out and see what kind of power we get from the generator, I'm going to run it for one hour and see how much charge we get from our inverter. It's priming right now. That scares the dogs. What was that, June? What was that? Was that an earthquake? We're not used to worrying about little things like lights or charging laptops or anything really. I mean, we just never worried about power. It was, it was pretty amazing how good that Battle Born system was. We were spoiled. Spoiled. We were spoiled. We were spoiled. Well, it's about an hour later and it stayed at 150 amps charging the whole time, which it should pretty much in the whole bulk stage up until 90 some percent. And it charged about 25 percent in the past hour. But we like to use solar as much as possible, especially when we're just sitting here. It's nice to just have the sun charge the batteries while you're doing nothing and not have to think about it. So that is something we're going to have to keep an eye on. Good morning. It's a beautiful Tuesday. We got here on Saturday and originally we didn't know like how long we were going to stay. We were pretty fluid on our planning and we thought we were only going to spend a couple of nights here. But this spot ended up being one of our top favorite boondocking spots in the entire country. We are so positively overwhelmed with just the tranquility and the beauty that we decided to stay and enjoy it. There's no need to rush your travel unless there's something on our schedule that's pushing us to do so. So in this case we said, oh my goodness this spot can't get any better. Let's stay and let's soak it up. So we've been unwinding from travel. We've been catching up on work. We've been building our routine that can get thrown off with travel days and we are loving it. So today is beautiful and sunny. We've had like weather all across the board. When we first got here it was in the 90s. It was hot and then after that it was cloudy. We had a little bit of rain. We had some wind. We had some really gray skies and now today it's comfortably cool and beautifully sunny. So we're glad we waited because today's weather is just perfect. Since we've been here we've been really enjoying our morning walks. We've done a couple of different routes. We've gone through the BLM roads that just kind of weave around. It's always fun to check out some of the other sites that are available. What the roads look like leading to those sites. What the views look like all around. And we even took a stroll into Torrey which is about a mile to two miles into town. It's definitely doable by foot. It's a good way to see it in the morning with the dogs to just walk down there and check out the stores and the restaurants that are around. A lot of them do breakfast so it got us craving some breakfast food early in the morning and the dogs absolutely love it as much as we do. So now that we're here and sitting and enjoying this boondocking spot we thought it would be a good opportunity to talk some house logistics stuff that goes on while you're parked somewhere that doesn't have resources like trash or laundry or things like that. So let's dig into our trash situation. Believe it or not this is the first time in our seven and a half years boondocking that we have a full size 13 gallon kitchen trash. Up until this point we've used little micro I think two or three gallon trash bags the entire time and we've really been liking the full size trash. We just filled it up for the first time and I said Erin do you have somewhere to put this full bag of trash? Because trash in trash out is something that doesn't get discussed a lot about. We've certainly shared tons of garbage tricks over the years but in this case it's just let's talk about where are we going to put it? How are we going to manage it? I don't even know. We have a few options. We're using this first bay here as our shoe rack which is working out very well. Also some overflow for dog food, bubbly water, my blower. Mostly the shoes is what's important. And then we got a lot of other big bays but I don't really have a lot of room you know when we left Elkhart we kind of just had to take everything that was in the fifth wheel and put it into the new rig obviously. And we have a lot of stuff. Here's our grill. This would normally be out set up if I didn't lose my propane hose in Colorado. Oh I think I remember where my dry bag is. I squirreled it away up here. I'm using all the nooks and crannies. We got a medium one and a big one. I think we'll use the big one. So we got 13 gallon trash bag here and I got a little spot cleared out there down in the pass through. Enough for that to fit right in there. Yeah the reason we use the dry bag we've talked about a dozen times. You know rodents can smell food and we didn't show this but our water bucket that we use to clean our dog's paws off after walking around out here before they climb into our bed. There was a dead mouse that we we found in in the water bucket. So there are mice in this area and their main driver to get in is food. So if they can smell anything they'll come in. So these dry bags are airtight and once you put them in there you know they're not going to smell it. This is the most vivid, beautiful, perfect full rainbow. Or like just a couple seconds maybe a minute. It's so beautiful. It's like freezing rain. Well after four days in a brand new boondocking spot we're we're in love. This is one of our favorite spots. Yeah it was just awesome. It checked every box for us. And then last night was the most epic double rainbow for like 15 minutes. It was absolutely insane. We always talk about the boondocking spots that are outside of these national parks are just as beautiful because you're literally looking you're literally looking at the national park. Yeah. And so all of our morning walks all of our evening walks all of our window views you know is all of these beautiful national park views. Yeah it was so fulfilling and it it feels really good to just say you know what let's just put all expectations aside on we should go do this or we should go do that. What we needed to do was just sit here and enjoy this incredible location. So we're on our way out and this is the spot where we scraped our generator pipe on the way in. So we're still learning the ground clearance on this RV. We actually saw another big long travel trailer come in and scrape on the way in. Same spot. So what we're finding out is this RV this uh 4x4c has about the same ground clearance as you know a typical travel trailer or fifth wheel. You know it's not off the chart but you can still get to these places that we've been going to over the years. Keep going. Stop. Nice and slow. Slow. Keep going. Keep going. Okay turn your wheels to the right and go forward. Just stop right there. Okay now go straight. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Really close. Keep going. I think you're okay now. Nice and slow. Keep going. Yeah you're fine now. Turn all the way left. Looking good. Looking good. Keep going. We made it. Yeah. Wow yeah that's a little tough of a situation. Ever wonder where the name Irene Iron Travels comes from? It's actually named after my online fitness and nutrition coaching business, Irene Iron Fitness. I help people move better, feel better, and eat better with strength training and real food. No fad diets, no harsh restrictions, no counting calories, and absolutely no processed food in a package. 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